ODYSSEY PART 23 - II: `Odyssey’ item on education – Part II

While our schools in Plymouth and Sheboygan County and our post-secondary colleges and vocational institutions are all struggling to offer quality education, there is a huge national challenge facing America: we are losing our competitive edge in the global economy.

Q. What helpful ideas and models emerge from your experience that could offer value for us here and for this great national need?

A. When I offered seminars that generated plenty of ferment in challenging the education status quo, the participating teachers, after momentarily getting excited, frequently came back with two responses. The first: “It's great to be gung ho for change because we all know it's needed, but every person I know already feels stressed, overworked, frustrated.” To every new idea, the answer was: “Leave me alone, I can't handle a lot of new learning. Things may not work very well and I may not be terribly successful, but at least I've figured out how to function and survive in my own way...”

The second response: “Even when I feel good with what I do, I may come across an idea or model that appears better than mine. I might be open to give it a try. But I know the system is not going to change. With all the rules and regulations, the teachers union, the school board, the monolithic layers of bureaucracy, the budget crunch, not to mention all the needs directly tied to student poverty and dysfunctional family backgrounds, whatever I do in my classroom is not going to change the system. The bottom line – change in education is not going to happen.”

Notwithstanding this pessimism, my colleagues and I have always found teachers and administrators and community leaders willing to stick their necks out to seek a better future. As of 2007, the U.S. is number 12 in the world in percentage of adults with a college degree. It's reported that fewer than 25 percent of 2010 high-school graduates taking the ACT college entrance exam have the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level college courses. When we organize “summits” of concerned people open to investing extra time in facing these negative trends, they immediately agree on three points: 1) a paradigm shift is going to happen in education sooner or later because it has to – the alternative is too scary to contemplate; 2) because most people will not buy in, we must find teachers and principals and parents and schools and civic leaders willing to take risks; 3) to get operational, we must mobilize talent and find the best models and do something.

In this and two subsequent columns I'll cite three examples, very briefly, from personal experience of “doing something.” These are discussed in detail (a chapter on each one) in my book “Odyssey of A Practical Visionary.” One of the pioneering models about new thinking about learning is Waldorf education. It is not “new” because this was conceptualized in the 1920s and 1930s by one of the 20th century's seminal thinkers, Rudolph Steiner, a radical Austrian social thinker born in 1861. There are more than 500 Waldorf schools worldwide, including more than 100 in the U.S., with several in Wisconsin. Because Waldorf education stresses the interplay between the student's inner experience and the outer world, its curriculum interrelates culture and history and the humanities with the physical world of nature and science. In developing profound concepts about the process of how people learn, Steiner formulated his model of a threefold image of the human being's faculties: thinking, feeling and willing. These qualities are cultivated at different rates as a person evolves from infancy into adulthood, each stage with its own learning requirements. Because Steiner was heavily influenced by the tragedy of World War I and the Russian revolution and the rise of Hitler, his philosophy was oriented toward social and spiritual renewal – a need as urgent today as when he lived. Waldorf graduates tend not only to perform exceptionally well academically; they also face life with an idealist aptitude for service.

One active participant in my seminars in the latter 1970s was Mark Stamm, who subsequently trained to become a Waldorf teacher. After working elsewhere, he returned to Milwaukee and convinced the superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) on the value of Waldorf education. In 1990 the School Board approved establishing a Waldorf school in Milwaukee. Since until then all Waldorf schools in America were private, and were located in areas drawing more affluent students, this new “Urban Waldorf School” pioneered on two fronts: It was the country's' first public Waldorf School, and also the first to be located in the inner city, drawing mostly lower income and minority students. Mark and the schools recruited me to organize an intensive university training program for the first cadre of teachers.

After the superintendent left MPS, some system staff raised doubts about the radical Waldorf approach to education – “too far out of the mainstream for Milwaukee.” In this model, for example, the same teacher accompanies the same class of children through all the elementary years, responsible for all the main subjects (with specialists for foreign language, crafts and physical education). When questions arose, I helped to assure that the school would be implemented and funded.

Urban Waldorf became well known nationally, as did our three-year training curriculum. Academic performance and attendance were exceptional, and observers arrived from all over the country. However, recently MPS lost its enthusiasm for this radical model and just this year – after 20 years – the school was defunded.

Two private Waldorf schools in metropolitan Milwaukee continue to prosper, but I'm aware of no comparable initiatives in Sheboygan County, although now and then people have expressed interest.